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for the next event in the series without further Ado now I'd like to introduce mini shiraldi who is as a many of you know an expert in this topic a national leader in criminal and Juvenile Justice and legal reform and mass incarceration reform who has worked in the field for more than four decades he is currently the Secretary of juvenile services for the state of Maryland he joined the Moore Miller Administration from Columbia University where he was the senior research scientist at the Columbia School of Social Work and co-director of the Columbia Justice lab their work focused on reducing the footprint and negative impact of Community Corrections eliminating youth prisons and creating a developmentally appropriate response for emerging adults Mr sharaldi went to Columbia from our program the Harvard County school program in criminal justice where he had been a senior researcher and has extensive government experience having served as a commissioner of New York City's Department of Correction where he has worked to close Rikers and end the practice of solitary confinement he also served as director of juvenile Corrections in Washington D.C as commissioner of New York City Department of Probation and a senior policy advisor to the mayor's office of Criminal Justice in New York City he also pioneered efforts at community-based alternatives to incarceration in New York City and Washington DC as founder and executive director of the center on juvenile criminal justice and the Justice policy Institute and has lectured at universities around the country and we are so grateful for your time and your expertise joining us today Vinnie thank you so much for being here um would you like to begin with uh kind of an introduction of the piece or do you want to jump right into the presentation yeah maybe I'll just jump right into the presentation since I was a little late today and sorry for that at running a department now it's a new world so uh stuff calls stuff calls no problem we're really glad to have you join us go ahead and take it away all right thanks a lot thanks for that introduction I appreciate it and I appreciate coming back home to the program in criminal justice um so I'm going to start uh with an excerpt from my book uh that I think lays out a bit of the conversation I'd like to have with everybody today uh and that'll save you the time and money having to buy and read the book so you want anything cut right to the end there um so here's an excerpt is Community Supervision an act of Mercy or an extension of punishment does it aim to rehabilitate uh let me see let me just how do I go to the next there you go um does it aim to rehabilitate and reintegrate people who have broken a law back into mainstream Society or to surveil the turn ultimately incarcerate minor rule Breakers does it reduce incarceration by serving as a timeder unless intensive brand of Community Corrections or is it merely a delayed form of incarceration does it soften the harsh blow of the penal system on black and brown people or is it part of an expansive system that excessively controls people of color and their communities something that exacerbates and extends rather than ameliorates systemic racism if we abolished it would we be able to replace it with more decent and effective community supports or would more people be incarcerated either because they weren't diverted or released for want of Community Supervision or because they got rearrested and why do we know so little definitively about these important question questions questions for the largest part of our carceral state which contributes more people to prison through non-criminal technical violations and the entire prison population of 1972 prior to the Advent of mass incarceration so I'm gonna I'm gonna take you through uh some of the some of the issues raised in my book and in this paper that um Evangeline Evie lepoo me and Tim itner wrote uh called how loose little supervision can we have uh that's now available to you on the annual review of criminology my book comes out in uh in the fall so here's the uh here's the here's what I want to walk you through I'll talk a little about the current carceral populations the origins of community supervision and how they've sort of affected the field throughout their existence uh the death of Rehabilitation that came about during the 1970s the impacts of supervision on uh individuals case examples of Reform and near abolition and where I think this takes us from here so uh let me start first by defining probation and parole uh probation is a front-end sentence that diverts people from incarceration or at least that was designed to divert people from incarceration by supervising them and putting them under conditions in the community parole is a back-end release mechanism for people who have participated in programs and played by the rules while they're incarcerated both were ostensibly designed to reduce the use of incarceration probation at the system's front end and parole at its back end and to do so in a way that promoted Public Safety by rehabilitating people who had broken the law here we see however that has mass incarceration ramped up from 1980 to its peak around the mid-2000s so did probation and parole incarceration Rising five about five-fold while Community Supervision Rose about four-fold of course the probation and parole were truly impacting prison and jail populations by reducing them as they were designed to do you'd see incarceration declining as Community Supervision rolls Rose instead probation and parole largely tracked prison and jail populations suggesting that they are an add-on rather than an alternative to incarceration or as the University of Wisconsin's Cecilia klingel calls them merely a delayed form of incarceration at the end of 2020 there are about 1.7 million U.S residents in prison in jail and about twice as many 3.9 million of us or one out of every 66 adults under Community Supervision so this is down with over 5 million uh in in the early 2000s but this is also a fuzzy number because it doesn't include people out on bail of people under pre-trial supervision or in many states it doesn't include people supervised by Private Probation companies foreign okay so why do we even use supervision uh the equivocal questions I started with is it a net Widener is it an alternative to incarceration does it help people does it punish people um suggest a good deal of role confusion within the field that is true and that has been true since its Beginnings uh it's true in Academia it's true among the advocacy Community it's true and philanthropy uh um and and has been for much of its existence which has created sort of a lack of policy research and advocacy attention as such the subject kind of feels like a black box to a lot of people uh so I want to back up a little and go to its Origins uh so we can see if we can tease some of the issues out so back in the 1840s there was sort of simultaneous invention of Probation and Parole uh in in different parts of the world uh Captain Alexander McConaughey uh was put in charge of the English penal colony on Norfolk Island uh in Australia in 1840 that's where people from England were being transported is what they said uh to um Australia as prisoners uh and McConaughey inherited a very brutal prison on Norfolk Island and was credited with turning it around and part of the way we've cut it returning around was by creating an incentive structure for people to behave well so that they could get out early he called that originally a mark system people would earn marks for good behavior and if they earned enough marks they could get out early and uh and then they would be supervised by his uh people on the outside and they behaved so well well upon release and the system worked so well for makani that they called people on parole McConaughey's gentleman uh this started to travel around the world it was replicated most broadly initially in Ireland about to call it the Irish system and then ultimately to France and the United States that was called originally the Marx system or tickets of leave but when it traveled to France uh they they used uh the term parole because parole means word in French and people were giving their word when they left prison so that's the word that stuck meanwhile right around the same time in 1841 John Augustus who was a member of the temperance movement in Boston and a boot maker uh started to post bail for people who were facing time in a city's House of Correction um and is that there's still by the way a uh a marker on the street uh in Boston if you could find it uh about John augustus's work uh he's called the father of uh probation um mostly he was bailing out people who were accused of vagrancy alcoholism prostitution he did this with the Court's approval uh with the notion that he would watch them and help them you know sort of mend their ways for a relatively short period of time and they return them to court and that the court was satisfied uh Augustus would get his bail back and those folks would go through free over a period of several years he and his Temperance movements colleagues because he needed other help because he was starting to bail out so many people um bailed out about 2 000 people and just a handful I think four or five uh forfeited bail all the rest all the rest made it and uh went on their way um Augustus was unabashedly merciful uh um uh as he put it his mission was quote to raise the Fallen reform the criminal and so far as my humble abilities would allow to transform the Abode of suffering and misery to the home of happiness um so the foundation of Probation and Parole was first kind of mixed during the Enlightenment uh Enlightenment and poor during the Industrial Revolution but then it concretized and grew during the Progressive Era which was an optimistic time colored by elements that were at once helpful and paternalistic immigrants and Rural residents were pouring into U.S cities during this time bringing with them customs and religious beliefs that were strange and unaccustomed to the to the Protestant white power structure which sought to acculturate and control these sort of teeming masses Josephine Shaw Lowell was a prominent Progressive whose friendly visiting that's what they call them efforts formed the basis of Probation and Parole practice she stated a constant and continued intercourse must be kept up between those who have a high standard and those who have it not and that the educated and happy and good are to give some of their time regularly and as a duty year in and year out to the ignorant miserable and the vicious no doubt the ignorant miserable and vicious appreciated this with this mix of sort of rehabilitative and helpful intent on the one hand and paternalistic and controlling intent on the other community supervision flourished and expanded through its first century first century plus of existence growing from small pilot voluntary pilot projects to be ensconced in law and practice in all states by Around the World War II foreign so here's a couple of quotes I think it's worth taking a look at and I'll get more into them uh Robert Martinson uh said uh in the 1970s it takes no leap of the imagination to see that these Community Supervision networks are impotent to deal with the kind of offender now dumped upon them my neighbors have long regarded these probation and parole agencies as as an affront to their common sense a kind of standing joke it's a far cry from uh what McConaughey and um uh and Augustus we're saying and believing uh John ehrlichmann of President Nixon's former assistant for domestic affairs uh wrote that the Nixon campaign in 1968 and the Nixon white house after that had two enemies the anti-war left and black people we knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black or by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin and then criminalizing both heavily we could disrupt those communities we could arrest their leaders raid their homes break up their meetings and vilify them night after night on the evening news so from the post-war era to the 1970s there was a swirling set of social forces that would ultimately bring the rehabilitative era of Criminal Justice to an end the end of the war brought home a group of white soldiers looking to recapture their jobs and black soldiers who had fought for their country who were in no mood to return to second-class status or Jim Crow restrictions increasing white race riots before and after the war and the migrations of millions of black people from segregation itself to Northern Western and Central U.S cities alarm Northern whites and tensions Rose in 1964 Barry Goldwater tried to capitalize on this by openly racializing his run for president helping him become the first Republican since reconstruction to win the South but outside of the South the only one is home state of Arizona Richard Nixon and his fellow Republicans learned goldwater's lessons and instead of overtly racial appeals prohibited to dog whistle tactics racializing crime and poverty issues as code words for race as part of their newly minted southern strategy Nixon was Victorious and in 1972 launched a War on Drugs that sort of marks The Unofficial start of America's March towards mass incarceration our prison population's Rose every year from 1972 to 2008 uh they'd largely been steady and not much out of uh balance with the rest of the World by the end of the growth of mass incarceration we were to far outstrip our historical rates and dwarf the rates of other countries so around that time in 1966 a little-known researcher named Robert Martinson was asked to participate in a meta-analysis of the recidivism effects of prison programming in New York state the paper which was finalized in 1970 yielded conflicting results some programs were some programs didn't show any positive outcomes and most were funded or implemented too poorly to discern one way or the other the report was initially shelved due to its inconclusive nature and it seemed to be that myth that the report was never published in 1974 Martin published a distillation of it under his own name and without the lead researcher's knowledge in the neoconserative journal public interest under the title quote what works the Martinson report as it came to be known exploded claiming that nothing works when it comes to rehabilitating people who had broken the law it became one of the most influential and frequently cited papers in the journal's history Landing Martinson on 60 Minutes on the front page of People magazine which was pretty heady stuff for a previously obscure academic especially back then when crime was not the Salient issue it is today state after State started to eliminate prison programming abolishing or curbing parole release and prison populations swelled this marked the turning point for probation and parole remember they were based and and founded on Notions of Rehabilitation so supervision agencies had to Pivot or chose to Pivot to a more punitive and surveillance focused approach conditions of supervision mushroom to an average of nearly 20 standard conditions that place people under curfews forbade them from traveling out of state opened them to warrantless searches prohibited them from associating with other people with criminal convictions and had sort of catch-all Provisions essentially requiring them to be of good character probation and parole officers armed themselves and Don flak jackets supervision began meeting out intermediate sanctions for rule violations intensive supervision often accompanied by electronic monitoring and house arrest proliferated and supervision increasingly came with a trigger finger back to incarceration to fail for failure to abide by increasingly stringent and irrelevant rules politicians were never prepared to pay for this onslaught of punitiveness and Probation and Parole were always the least powerful players at the budget table so they saw their budgets cut while their caseloads swelled and politicians increasingly criticized them for high profile families so now you got high case loads risk-averse politicians a shrinking social safety net massive collateral consequences of convictions and employee pool drawn increasingly from Criminal Justice rather than Social Work schools and a public seemingly intolerant or formerly incarcerated people this all contributed to an environment in which incarceration for technical non-criminal violations became the rule rather than the exception so much so that in a survey of people entering Texas prisons two-thirds said they'd prefer a year in prison to 10 years on probation and a third said they prefer a year in prison for three years on probation the director of a County uh Texas County director of probation at Texas County told the Dallas Morning News that they've given the choice between probation and prison he himself would take prison part of the outcomes of this was increasingly willing increasing willingness to charge uh people on probation and parole user fees for government supervision and part of it was to entirely hand supervision over to free to the taxpayers that is supervision provided by private providers and paid for entirely by such news so whether probation and parole were ever a true alternative to incarceration this data from uh EV Tim and my report shows that from 1980 to present Community Supervision was no longer supplanting incarceration if it ever did probation expanding in tandem with uh incarceration so figure two shows the number of people sentenced to probation and parole relative to index crimes so probation and parole's use is increasing uh um relative to how many people are being arrested so the likelihood of being put on probation or parole uh per crime Rose consistently for the last 40 years essentially um probation and parole instead of being an alternative are really more and more defined by practitioners and uh academics as a tripwire to incarceration in which any misstep can trigger a revocation one such persons Kerry label who was finally paroled from California prisons after 25 years upon release he seated he received a donation of clothing from musician and activist nipsy Hustle when a friend of Mr lathans died shortly after his release from prison uh he headed to Nipsey hussle's Marathon clothing store on his way to the funeral so he could look more presentable as he was entering the store a crowd of people surrounded nipsy hustle happened to be there on that tragic day someone in the crowd shot and killed Mr hustle wounding Mr Lapin in the process while Mr Latham was convalescing at the hospital and while President Obama and Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti were eulogizing Nipsey hustle Mr lathan's parole officer slapped a technical violation on him for associating with a known gang member Nipsey Hustle moving him and his wheelchair to the notorious L.A county jail he was only released by Governor Newsom after public uproar over his incarceration so another part of the outcome of the expansion of Probation and Parole at a time of fiscal conservatism was increasing willingness to charge people on probation and parole user fees quote unquote for government supervision including entirely handing supervision over to Private Probation companies whose budget was paid completely by people forcibly under Supervision in Georgia a state in which there are almost as many people on Parade probation and parole has lived in Atlanta Thomas Parrott stole a two dollar can of beer he was a pharmacist who had become addicted to the the Pharmaceuticals got convicted lost his license lost his family and developed a severe drinking problem he was living in subsidized housing uh surviving on food stamps and by selling his blood plasma plasma for a pocket money so after he stole his two dollar can of beer he represented himself because he couldn't afford the 50 public defender fee it was fined two hundred dollars and placed on electronic monitoring and Private Probation with Sentinel offender services for 12 months at a cost of eighty nine dollars for the startup fee thirty nine dollars a month to be on probation and twelve dollars a day for the electronic monitoring totaling four hundred dollars a month when he couldn't pay it sell enough blood to pay these fees in part because he was weak from doing without food to save money to pay the fees is arrears Rose to twelve hundred dollars and it was ultimately jailed for a year for a probation violation Mr Barrett stated I should not have taken that be or I was dead wrong but to spend 12 months in jail for stealing one can of beer it just didn't seem right foreign maybe it's not helping people turn their lives around but maybe it's improving Public Safety uh we we report on a lot of uh of studies in both the book and the Articles um and I just summarized two here Amy Solomon uh once at the urban Institute now uh uh uh the head of the office of Justice programs at the United States Department of Justice uh did a careful analysis of people released from prison on parole versus people released uh not on the parole uh to see whether Pearl supervision post to prison made a difference and she said in fact the public safety impact of supervision is minimal and often non-existent among the largest shared release cohort males convicted of property drug and violent offenses for around 80 percent of the releases uh further uh David Harding and his colleagues found that supervision serves as a risk factor for future criminal legal system involvement due to worsened labor market outcomes and increase scrutiny so it doesn't improve Public Safety ing to this research and is actually a risk factor I found no uh empirical evidence that either probation or parole or a combination of probationary will improve Public Safety supervision disproportionately impacts black and brown people Jay-Z wrote after his friend Meek Mill was incarcerated for a technical parole violation for two to four years after having been on probation for 12 years his entire young adulthood in Philadelphia our criminal justice system entraps and harasses hundreds of thousands of black people every day instead of a second chance probation ends up being a landmine with a random misstep bringing consequences greater than the crime associate attorney general Vanita Gupta when she was president of the leadership conference on civil rights said there's an Ever growing problem in our nation revolving door of incarceration through probation or parole supervision and the grossly and Equitable treatment of black and brown people within it is past time that we transform probation and parole systems nationally and in the cycle of mass incarceration and the inequitable treatment of people of color controlling for other factors people under supervision are people of color under supervision are supervised longer are violated incarcerated more frequently and overall have a harder time navigating probation and parole supervision successfully Community Supervision has been shown to provide a thin and what researchers Michelle Phelps and Emily ebony ruling call a perverse Lifeline to services to desperately pour people on probation that's one of the one of the positive outcomes is that uh America's uh Social Service net is so thin that contacts with probation officers can provide a thin lifeline white people tend to be on probation for more serious offenses suggesting it is a true alternative to course incarceration for them but a net Widener for many people of color more affluent people under supervision hasn't have an easier time navigating supervision they can afford their fees they can take time off to work to sit in probation and parole offices waiting to be seen and transport themselves to and from meetings and other obligations they can afford Child Care while they attend supervision meetings and they can afford representation if they are accused of a violation which is not necessarily provided to Indigent folks on probation many ostensibly race neutral conditions cut against people of Colorado's peak one in 12 black men in the U.S was under supervision one in three black Americans have a felony record so let's just pause over that was saying so a condition like avoid contact with people with criminal convictions becomes absurdly hard for people in communities that are concentrated by race and poverty in this book I examine the impacts of supervision on communities of color by looking at its impact on people in Milwaukee Milwaukee routinely ranks as the worst city in the country for black people to live in and containing arguably the most incarcerated zip code in the United States and the nation's first prison built entirely to incarcerate people on probation and parole the average length of stem parole in Wisconsin is the highest in the country 70 percent higher than a national average and an astonishing one in eight black men and one in 11 indigenous men in Wisconsin between the ages of 18 and 64 is under Community Supervision half of everyone entering Wisconsin's prisons annually are under supervision at the time of their incarceration costing the state 148 million dollars annual but Watkins Milwaukee's rough and Tony was one of those people in 2019 Police Stopped Mr Tony a black man as he was sitting in a parked car outside a quick trip convenience store with a white woman they observed him and the woman for 15 minutes ran her plates and found that she was one stopped for a driving infraction while with a man with outstanding warrants the officer immediately learned that Mr Tony was not that man uh what s to see his ID anyway from which they learned that he was on probation for driving while intoxicated Mr Tony admitted that he was in possession of cocaine and when the officers tried to arrest him he ran tripped and fell was apprehended and incarcerated although police dropped the charges uh his probation officer pursued a technical violation against Mr Tony uh he admitted to the violation enrolled in a drug treatment program inside the Milwaukee secure Detention Facility shortly before he was to complete the program he was kicked out for quote failing to sufficiently accept responsibility for his drinking problem although he had a clean record while incarcerated a stable home unemployment the judge sentenced him to two years in prison because he quote did not go deep enough in addressing why he made the choices he did to abuse alcohol on drugs so in the paper with uh Evie and Tim we conducted a series of regression analyzes examining the relationship between supervision rates the prison rate violent crime rate and index crime we looked at data from all 50 states over 40 years for which there were more or less reliable data as it said doesn't capture everything we did nine multivariate models three independent burials probation parole and supervision rates which is probation and parole combined three dependent variables the prison rate the violent crime rate and the index crime rate and we controlled for factors like poverty unemployment rates racial ethnic composition of the population political composition of state legislators and drug arrest rates so controlling for these other confounders parole was significantly related to violent crime rates the current year and the following year probation had no statistically significant impact so one of the two things probation and pearls are supposed to do is keep us safer parole made us less safer probation had no impact and Probation and Parole and total supervision were significant related significantly related significantly positive related to incarceration rates the current year and the following year so the more people you have on probation and the more people you have on parole the more people you incarcerate not the less people you incarcerate so kind of failing at its two major purposes the evidence provides two important findings supervision and some currently practices not achieving either of its dual goals of reducing incarceration and improving safety outcomes and concerted policy efforts including legislative and practice changes are necessary to sustainably reduce the reach and punitiveness of supervision so I'll give you two case studies how am I doing with the time Eddie done you're doing great no you're doing great keep going you shook your head you didn't make a happy face I'm delighted continue please thank you so first is California um some litigation by the prison Law Office against truly horrible conditions in California prisons I think there were a 200 percent of capacity uh yielded uh Decisions by the court that California had to release prisoners had to get down to 137.5 of capacity so just let pause over that for a second that being overcrowded by 37.5 percent was uh what the what the court ordered not not complete releases um and uh so what happened was there was a series of bills that got passed in California the Community Corrections uh performance incentivac the California Public Safety realignment Bill and proposition 47 which is the safe neighborhoods and schools Act the Community Corrections performance incentive Act fiscally incentivized counties to not send people to prison for non-violent non-drug uh offenses that did not involve sexual offending either and so they were forbade from sending those types of folks to prison supervised them on probation and locally or put them in jail locally but for shorter terms and they were given hundreds of millions of dollars uh to pay for mental health counseling and victims uh uh Services the California's Public Safety green alignment Bill uh similarly uh realigned um uh some State functions to counties in exchange for returning money to the counties in the safe neighborhoods and school act downgraded uh seven misdemeanor offenses things like petty theft possession of small amounts of drugs uh two uh become misdemeanors instead of felony so you couldn't go to state prison for them or be put on obviously parole because you wouldn't have gone to State Prison and you would only be on misdemeanor supervision which is generally shorter and California a very very light touch almost non-existent um and again hundreds of millions of dollars were sent to the counties so they could run victims programs mental health programs other block grant programs to keep themselves safe in lieu of incarceration foreign had enormous impacts on California's prisons overall there are 150 000 fewer people under uh Community Supervision and tens of thousands of fewer people in prison as a result of these bits of legislation and as a result of continuing declines in crime so crime went down and so did prison populations jail populations probation populations and parole populations and the probation revocation rate fell all during this time the governor was so um pleased with these outcomes that he later shortened assigned legislation shortening probation terms to two years for felonies of one year from misdemeanors and shortened parole terms to two years supervision terms that is and um uh allowed people to earn more time off for achieving certain Milestones like getting a high school diploma or or getting certificates things like that so this all you know some states a role in probition terms are five years ten years so this this all sort of helped shrink the footprint and all during that time uh crime continues to decline in the Golden State New York I'm very familiar with because I was Commissioner of probation in New York City uh made a series of incremental changes to its criminal legal system uh made durable and sizable investments in Social Services social supports social opportunities to preempt system involvement and to to put people in in lieu of system uh penetration uh there were efforts by highly organized advocacy organizations and a network of community groups and open-minded elected and appointed officials like myself but many DA's many Corrections Commissioners in New York City uh fit in that um in that category so from 2000 from 1996 to 2019 I remember New York was legendary for our uh our crime rates um people were making movies about us uh Escape From New York the out-of-towners uh things like that Central Park was off limits after dark because people were getting mugged all the time uh things were tough tough tough in the 90s there were 2200 homicides in New York City um but from 1996 to 2019 uh we experienced in New York City what Franklin zimmering a professor from UC Berkeley described as the longest and most sustained drop in crime in uh in the history of any major metropolitan area during this time however it did not happen this drop and climb because we got tough on people it's a real important lesson for us to learn uh prison populations jail populations probation populations and parole populations all plummeted in New York City during this time period UH 60 percent of that decline ing to Mike Jacobson from CUNY can be accounted for by the decline in arrests right fewer people walking in the front of the courthouse a few people walking out to jail but 40 percent couldn't and that's really important uh so what what became another 40 how did that happen uh so first of all judges just started uh reducing the sort of use of formal system uh Touches for people uh and particularly the deep end touches total case dispositions decline as I said by 42 percent diversions and dismissals increased by 14 while cases while arrests if you will were declining by 42 percent prison sentences declined by 51 percent split sentences which is probation and parole dropped by 81 and probation sentencing rates declined by 58 percent at the same time my predecessors were making probation much more like touch so when I got there almost more than half of the people on probation were answering to a machine like the one you see here instead of having to sit and wait a couple of hours to see a PO and answer the same stupid five questions they asked me the week before you'd answer those same stupid five questions to that machine and be out in five minutes foreign so the city made big Investments on the state in uh in uh Social Service organizations these are a few examples of some of those groups that started to provide alternatives to incarceration and just supports for people um the the contracts from New York City were very specific that all of these groups had to show that they were actually displacing people from incarceration instead of widening this net is social control I think that helped reduce the number of people who were incarcerated uh but it also I think inadvertently I don't think they were intending to be alternatives to probation but helped reduce the number of people on probation the number of people on probation in New York in the mid 90s was 82 000 people and it's 11 000 people now but it was also a really uh sort of sophisticated network of uh Advocates that push these kinds of reforms and really made the case for Less incarceration and more community supports and they range from uh from the funders which I think is a somewhat unique New York phenomena there's a lot of big private money in New York to help spark this kind of uh of advocacy uh but I think it's it's a lesson to be learned for others because we're spending as Government a lot of money to a lot of people up and we could be diverting that money to their communities to help reduce the number of people who are locked up and then as I said uh open-minded officials uh also uh we expanded Indigent representation the city created uh Queens Brooklyn the Bronx and uh an additional New York Defenders to add to uh Legal Aid Society and Harlem Defenders and these folks uh all added social workers to help present alternative uh to incarceration proposals um at court so I think this is sort of a web of changes that happened in New York that helped push down incarceration and supervision simultaneous with the reduction in crime in the city and I you know I think also that the uh the decline in crime allowed system stakeholders allowed judges allowed probation Commissioners allowed prosecutors to experiment with somebody's Alternatives in ways that uh if the the crime rates were Rising they might not have uh and Greg Berman had a center for court Innovation one of the one of the better programs in New York described this as a thousand small Senators so why supervision uh we concluded that a probation and parole are not improving Public Safety are associated with higher incarceration rates and are accompanied by negative outcomes it's logical to ask not only why so many people are under supervision but also why is it used at all has it made the case when I interviewed with Mayor Bloomberg and we talked about uh probation um he asked me what I thought of it and I said not much my answer was if I came to you with 80 million dollars and 30 000 troubled and troubling Souls would you go out and hire a thousand Civil Service protected bureaucrats to have them piss in the cup once a week and tell them to go forth and sin no more and he said no I'm pretty sure I wouldn't do that I said well you know I haven't been to your probation department so I'm not specifically talking about you but I'm pretty sure that's what you got right now and he looked at there were three Deputy Mayors in the room part of the interview and they all kind of shrugged and nodded uh one of my predecessors at probation Marty horn also was executive director of State parole Marty said if tomorrow all the parole offices in New York City were taken on a cruise for a month would there be an appreciable change in the crime rate to spend the kind of money the state does on parole you'd have to be able to say there definitely would be Marty was pretty good with his quotes uh so just a couple of other quick examples uh and Katie how am I doing let's take five more minutes Vinnie and then we'll move into question so Virginia you know when when all these states were abolishing parole release around the 70s and 80s because uh the rehabilitative ethic was it came you know under uh criticism Virginia took it a step further and they abolished post-release supervision they abolished parole supervision from 1995 to 1999. now I don't have another random Virginia to assign uh uh people too but the crime in the state continued to decline by 30 percent during those four years more than neighboring North Carolina uh misdemeanors are supervised very lightly or not at all in several jurisdictions in New York City only three tenths of a percent of misdemeanor arrests result in probation California rarely supervises uh misdemeanor probation and tens of thousands of additional people were added to misdemeanor roles when Prop 47 passed and crime continued to go down so you took all these people off a felony probation and put them on misdemeanor supervision which is pretty much nothing in California and crime continued to decline and then there are counties in some states I know Arizona and Tennessee for sure where uh the state pays for uh felony probation or for misdemeanor probation that's a local cost and some counties have just abolished it because they can't afford it nothing happens so I'm going to skip over this and I'm going to go to uh what I call incremental abolition and I did this on purpose just to piss off both incrementalists and abolitionists and I hope I'm successful in that reboot um but really this this could work in my view whether you're going for abolition or just a very significant downsizing um my recommendations are to capture the savings uh that we now I think waste on locking people up for technical violations it's about one in four people entering prisons every year coming in for a technical uh it's higher in some states like I said about Wisconsin Minnesota a couple other places um put that money back into the communities get the right people on the bus right away which means my view meeting with indigenous people in those neighborhoods who are trying to work and help people right now turn their lives around but they're doing it by holding big sales pulling money out of their own Pockets feeding people from church basements uh and trying to help them grow a backbone and by that I mean some of these non-profits or or these these these folks that are just helping people they can't answer a government RFP 150 pages I just came back from Colorado right before I started this job where the Latino Coalition is a backbone organization the state grants the money to the Latino Coalition Latino Coalition fans out around Colorado to find people who are trying to do these kinds of good works in their own neighborhood gives them small grants to start with helps them with all their back office stuff their their accounting they're reporting to the government helps them frame what they do their secret sauce in a way that the government can understand and relate to and fund and then provide them with a float so that you know because a lot of times when you get a government grant I don't know how many you have ever gotten one it takes like six months before the first check comes well you know you can't you can't survive on that if you know if you're not a big organization uh so a Latino Coalition does the float for them uh they have enough money stored up so they can pay them immediately and they wait for the money to come from the state show me the money like I said you gotta you gotta move the money from decarceration into communities you can't just capture it all and cut taxes and fill potholes uh Race Matters you have to pay attention to um reducing this we're not going to just inadvertently reduce racial disparities we have to be deliberately anti-racist if the pay attention to what kinds of programs we're running where we're running them are they culturally relevant are they meeting the needs of the people in various different communities including communities of color that are wildly disproportionately uh incarcerated and supervised start with your principles don't start with your widgets far too much of what what um what masquerades as reform is sort of Point score systems and contacts of people on probation like that's not going to get us out of this maybe we'll use some of that stuff once we start with principles that say that people should be treated with decency and fairly uh but if we start with widgets we're going to end with widgets and then follow the data and share it don't don't hide your data uh the the government uh is famous for doing that it engenders a tremendous amount of distrust in communities it also uh engenders distrust in fellow sister agencies and amongst the courts and prosecutors if you can't be transparent with your data everybody somewhat rightly assumes that you're hiding stuff um Marty's alternative path by the way which I think is interesting and worth taking a look at uh is instead of doing all that stuff which is sort of government organized money just said give them give them several thousand dollars worth of vouchers when they come out let them crowdsource and see what folks coming out of prison empowered with their own resources decide to do with those resources I think that probation and parole have been around for a long time there's been a lot of people who have over the centuries uh tried to reform them and yet at the end of that in my view that dog won't hunt it really is not there's not strong evidence that it either reduces uh crime or reduces incarceration uh and uh so it hasn't proven itself and I'm very skeptical of people who say well just one more chance on this even though I'm a big Second Chance guy um and I think other options shrinking abolishing shifting money through a planned uh uh effort like what I described or crowdsourcing like what Marty suggested or at least at least worth giving a shot and honestly uh study I think that's it yeah thank you so much for that it was a great March through the piece and uh insight into your upcoming book I know we said and I'll continue to say we want questions from the audience and we already have at least one in the chat um and folks can either raise their hands or um drop those questions in the chat and we'll we'll let you ask them yourself I certainly have some prepared too so happy to start with Josh dankoff if you want to unmute and ask your question and then we can fill in from there foreign I think Josh is still on but I don't um see him on meeting so in that interest I'm happy to read the question which is any commentary Vinnie on GPS or ankle monitoring and its Trends and impacts on outcomes is it also overused and or unhelpful yeah I mean from what I what I've seen of researchers I didn't really sort of plow into this because other people have written books on this what I've seen of it is that like intensive supervision which has been studied pretty extensively and I do talk about in a book uh it tends to not improve outcomes either um rehabilitative outcomes or recidivism outcomes uh and it contributes to revocations and uh returns to incarceration so yeah I know it makes people feel good just like Probation and Parole and make elected officials feel like at least something is happening but I think after all this time we really need more than that thanks for that go ahead Hannah thank you um thanks for this talk I my incentives I work for the Kennedy School of government performance lab and I work on providing technical assistance to pre-trial agencies and it feels like a lot of the trends you've mentioned show up a lot in the future work and it feels like pre-taught agencies are often replicating the harms that probation systems that are just copying and pasting although it's a very different system and I was wondering if you could speak to a little bit on how you expect to see pre-trial reforms happen and what you think people like myself were working on providing support to agencies should be really focused on and where are you Hannah I'm currently working with um the Illinois office of Statewide pre-trial services so we all work remotely but I was previously working with Harris County right um so you know I I thought that one of the good things about having so many Advocates and and having the courts and prosecutors have gained trust over time in New York is that it allowed us to push the envelope on a lot of stuff and I thought that even before Bell reform passed um we had a pretty good system of getting in immediately evaluating people for whether they were or not at risk of running away getting those recommendations to the courts and then when they set bail if they set bail trying to hustle their families to get down there and post it it was a really kind of aggressive effort to make all that stuff happen so then um when the city decided to close Rikers which it did uh about I think the second year of Mayor De Blasio's term um the uh you know the largest number of people in Rikers were in pre-trial so they stood up um a network of pre-trial service agencies and a really heavily negotiated it with our excellent Defender groups and kept it very like touch very reminder focused uh rather than surveillance focus and very uh attachment to Services focused if people wanted to voluntarily uh so I'm I'm kind of a I'm kind of a less is more person on pre-trial supervision um I don't think we're going to cure people nor should we that haven't been convicted of anything pre-trial if they want access to Services we should help them get them but we should definitely not load them down with conditions uh and we should help help them remember to get to court because a lot of times people just don't go because they forget or they get the wrong day and all that kind of stuff thanks for that I have a kind of follow-up question that I think dovetails well with that topic which is you know in the paper and and in your talk you spoke about how your predecessors at the Department of Probation and then your own work of any there focused in part on um requiring early termination being initiated by POS discouraging replication as an agency practice right these kind of discretionary uh elements of monitoring that was done by individual probation officers so I'm wondering so much of the discussions about reform right now and the absence of legislative intervention talk about those same kinds of discretionary initiatives whether led by District Attorney's offices or led by parole agencies or probation agencies right where it depends on the actual realization of those policies in the practice of a courtroom and I'm wondering how you can effectively Monitor and manage Personnel to ensure that that policy is being carried out and in particular in line with what you just said at the end of your presentation about the importance of intentional attention towards race and racial disparities what are the ways that agencies can do that kind of monitoring with that intention in mind great questions um so I just I prefer legislative fixes to to uh policy you know policy fixes because you know if I get hit by a truck who knows that the next person is going to do and I think we're going to see the uh whether whether some of that changes under under mayor Adams who's a little tougher on crime uh than Mayor de Blasio but I was Mayor Bloomberg's commissioner so it wasn't like he was exactly soft on crime I just was able to talk him into some of this stuff because he was a big evidence guy well as your research shows that that whole framing tougher on crime or not is itself a question right sorry to interrupt but just wanted to note that we use that shorthand but actually what's producing safety right yeah good question I mean so one of the things we did was we did have the ability to go back to the judges and ask for early discharge and I think we were using it three per in three percent of the cases and what I said to the mayor was there's a lot of meaningless stuff that goes on in government but I challenge you to find a more meaningless expenditure of government dollars than that last year of a five-year probation term on a guy that's been doing fine for four years it's getting you nothing you're just wasting money and you're blowing this guy's day because a lot of times you have to wait like two two and a half hours because the PO is all stacked up and so you know that was a kind of business way of approaching it so we increased early discharges six-fold I did it by in a couple of ways one was I was constantly trying to sell stuff to my staff so I wasn't just going to issue policies I was sitting down I was explaining them I was showing them the data um I was saying how incentives work better than you know threats of punishment and that when you pull people on probation and ask them what do they want the answer is off probation so it's a big incentive we have at our disposal and so we then set up a work group and they came back with recommendations and I ensconced those recommendations into policy after I got them back from staff so this way staff weren't hanging out there and and they were if x if there's x amount of time I don't remember the details uh that a person on high risk behaves well you drop it on a medium risk then down a low risk and if they're doing well there and it's like six months six months six months we go back to court and ask for early discharge so you know we we dropped a lot of people on probation and then I asked the state which had the data on how my people were doing to compare how people discharged early bid versus people who stayed on for the whole time and people discharged early had lower rearrest rates uh Post Release than people who stayed on for the full turn Bloomberg was happy with that that's always a thing that makes him happy uh and and so that was good the state on parole was the one who wanted to had one of the highest numbers of parole revocations in the country that incarceration parole revocations when I was at Columbia we did a study and it cost 680 million dollars uh worth of of technical parole violations in New York so that that paper was called less is more and uh Advocates then uh drafted a less is more Act to eliminate most technicals and then when if people did get violated they had the ability to go before court before they were detained not before the parole board but before a court the court would decide whether they should be held while they were awaiting their adjudication of their violation and then if they did get violated the terms were one week for the first violation two weeks for the second violation and never more than a month for the third violation and on the flip side if they didn't get a violation every 30 days they didn't get a violation they got 30 days cut off of their uh parole term so if you never got violated and you had three years of post-release parole supervision you had done an 18 months uh when we wrote that paper and I think it was 2018 2019 there were 800 people in Rikers Island for technical violations that was the only population that was increasing last time I looked last month there were 12 people so um I prefer the legislator fixed because it's a little more durable but there's tons of stuff we can do as Commissioners ourselves to to help people out we've got a flurry of questions now Vinnie so I'm gonna just ask one quick follow-up from Sandy Jones Sandy do you want to ask your question foreign I just wondered how the Judiciary responded when you um made you know the the efforts toward early supervision release so we before we did it we went and spoke with all the judges we actually did two things with the judges it was really cool um there were 15 000 uh so I had 30 000 people on supervision and 15 000 people out on warrants right because they had stop coming to probation some decades ago so we we started to talk to the judges about both of these things on the warrants fortunately my my general counsel was a former homicide prosecutor so he had a lot of you know cred Wayne McKenzie he just recently finished being the head of the uh um American Bar Association it's criminal justice section um and so we went in and we pitched him and said look what if what if these 15 000 people walked into your court threw their hands up in the air and said I surrendered what would you do um because if they're out for all this time on abscondance we we issue warrants immediately we tell the courts and I issue warrant so that meant they were out there not committing crimes because there was one thing NYPD was really good at it was doing warrant checks on people they stopped they weren't even getting stopped so uh the judge said you know I said would you lock them up would you put them back on probation the judge said no we we terminate probation I said well what if we just bring those case to 100 of those cases to you every month and ask for early termination for it we just terminate the warrants and that's what we did all five bars 100 cases a month for many many months I I don't know what the final count was but it was thousands of people didn't have warrants anymore on the flip side with early discharges the judges just weren't used to them uh and they you know they only got them uh for people who had money and had paid lawyers because you know most of people on probation the last time they were in court it wasn't a good experience so they weren't like running back to court um and so you know we we kind of carefully worked with the judges and talked to them about it and they were pretty cool they trusted us also you know liability largely then falls on us political liability because we we made the recommendation so you know I was telling them I'm willing to stand up on this so they knew that if something bad happened at least we'd share the beaten that we would take in the New York Post thanks to that we've got about five minutes left and we've got I don't know at least a question a minute coming in so um I think the order in which I I saw these hands Felix has a question earlier in the chat and then Sandra had a hand up um and then uh Lloyd and then Simon that's our order so Felix why don't you take us off maybe we can ask all the questions now and then we can kind of is that easier for you Vinnie so that you kind of have a stream all right so go ahead Felix hey Vinnie uh thank you for a great presentation uh I said a quick question about the rise of uh risk assessment in this space and whether you think it had sort of any impact at all um I can imagine um that there are some that are just based on you know expert opinions or whatever it might not be much of a departure but I know some of them are supposed to be data driven I'm just curious if you think that had any impact on either whether these were effective tools or racial disparities um in how they're being deployed thank you okay go ahead Sandra so um thank you so much for a terrific talk I can't wait for the book um which I expect a signed copy of um that's right on Race Matters it would be great if you could share um examples of of reforms that um were intentionally uh designed and implemented with racial equity in mind um and uh yeah and and give us a sense too of what happens when we don't do that like why is it that we could have reforms that we think should matter and end up increasing racial disparities if we don't take if we aren't if we aren't intentional I think um there's a piggybacking off of one uh on point that Katie made earlier thank you thank you Lloyd go ahead uh I'm curious about what uh relationship um if any that that you perceive between police reform and I'm thinking here of uh commissioner Bratton bratton's time uh in in New York City um and the decline in crime which occurred uh during that uh during that period the relationship between police reform and the reforms that you described and then finally we've got Simon and I again Vinnie I know it's limited time so we'll we'll see how much you can speak to each of these very different questions uh great presentation Vinnie uh any thoughts about uh parole decision making and also uh the incentive that it may provide probation as well in terms of uh needed treatment alrighty I'll do my best on these let me start with the first two I'm going to try and say them together I want to just add one other point um in addition to all this other stuff part of what I think is important about uh working together with communities to um co-design what kind of services supports and opportunities people get in lieu of confinement is that it builds more cohesive communities and informal social controls and I just want to tip my hat to Rob Sampson for the work he's done on that greatly influenced a big part of the book and Pat Sharkey too um and uh so I think that you know a lot of our systems we focus we hyper focus on individuals because that's the way the legal system structure is set up uh you did a bad thing I'm dealing with you your next one did a bad thing next one did a bad thing I think it's a lot easier to find violent places than violent people and I think if we could do more to uplift the places we'd have a lot fewer violent people probation and parole notwithstanding treatment notwithstanding you know all that other stuff so on risk assessment and race I want to put those two answers together for a second um I did a paper uh with um um a a bunch of co-workers Elizabeth Hinton Hoyt and um uh Jason zeidenberg and Brenda um Brendan's last name uh for the Casey Foundation we evaluated the fourth uh the four or five sites they had been doing this Juvenile Detention Alternatives initiative and two of them had stopped having racial disparities after cops brought the kids to the front gate of detention whereas previously racial disparities kept exacerbating after that point more kids of color got detained then they got uh adjudicated delinquent or convicted more frequently they got placed in deeper in uh programs frequently and they were able to stop that and they it wasn't and there was no home run it was a lot of doubles and singles one of them to to Felix's question was risk assessment instruments and they really took very careful looks at their risk assessment instruments they evaluated all they created their own and then he evaluated any one of them that was exacerbating disparities and then compared so they they put a racial lens on it um and said is the benefit of predictability worth the cost of racial disparities so examples were uh gang membership or did a did a family member show up at the detention hearing that's actually a very big predictor of the kid not showing up if a family member didn't show it's a big predictor but intact middle-class families have the ability to show up at hearings that single moms who've already taken three four days off because of this process don't and so they then expanded the death and also some kids aren't living with their parents they're living with a guardian or a grandmother or an aunt and so they expanded that they eliminated gang membership right and then they tested what kind of impact did that have on failure to report and what kind of impact did it have on racial disparities that's one thing they did the other thing is they started putting the services in the kids-owned communities run by culturally relevant organizations and then they expanded the number of social workers at the public defender's office so they could fight the way middle class families fight for their kids when they come before the law so that they had advocates in there instead of being standing there all by themselves and then finally they did a major major effort to accelerate case processing uh one of the people I interviewed said um uh what was the what was the quote uh racial disparities flourish in a sloppy system like kids just don't sit around in detention for a really long time waiting for a placement if my son was arrested I'd find him a damn placement fast I'd take my credit card out and pay for it and kids who are poor who are disproportionately going to be kids of color don't have that ability so when they did all of that what it basically did was it stopped it stopped making it worse they didn't go before that to arrest because the police won part of the jdi initiative um but at least it didn't get worse at the front door I equivocate in the book on on risk assessments I kind of put both sides of the argument I really I wrote that chapter 20 different times and sent it to a bunch of different people I just don't know the damn answer to this I really don't uh it's hard for me to know what's worse a risk assessment instrument that conglomerates all the racial disparities that people experience and over policing in their communities and all that kind of stuff or the gut instinct of my probation officers uh and so my point that I make in the end of that chapter is it to me at the end of this we're pretending that we are creating some sort of scientific approach to what's a crappy service at the end of the day and this gets to my treatment which is I think I understand as I'm pivoting to the treatment one I understand uh how uh you kn